Wait

Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; for You, I wait all the day.
PSALM 25:5

What do you like to wait on? Not a thing. We don’t like to wait in traffic. We don’t enjoy waiting for one-day delivery. We want a company to figure out a new way to get it to us even faster. We live our lives on demand. We want what we want in the timing that we want it and how we want it to come. And waiting—we want nothing to do with that.

The challenge and danger with this on-demand mentality are that we bring it into our relationship with God our Father. You may be able to call customer service for a product that you’ve been waiting on. You can bark at them and get them to jump a little bit or pay them more money to expedite the delivery process. But that demand does not work with the Lord, and it can be frustrating. It’s frustrating if we bring an on-demand mentality into the presence of God because God our Father will not budge. What we need to understand is that He’s teaching many great nuggets of truth in the waiting. In the waiting, we learn that God knows what He’s doing. His timing is perfect, even though it’s not our timing. The way He’s bringing things to fulfillment is also perfection, even though it’s not how we would do it. Waiting can be valuable in our lives.

We find waiting in Mark 1:1–3. Mark looks back into God’s Word and sees it being fulfilled in the timing and manner in which God wanted to fulfill it. Mark quotes from two of the prophets, Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3. He’s looking back six hundred years! He’s showing us the importance of waiting.

God gave His word. He promised He would fulfill His word, but people had to wait. I want to encourage you today that God our Father is faithful to you in Jesus’ name, according to His Word. Still, His faithfulness comes in His timing in the fulfillment of His manner of His choosing in your life. And in the waiting, we begin to learn that God our Father knows what He is doing, and we can trust Him with our lives.

We can trust Him with every detail of our life’s journey, but we have to learn to wait. It will be challenging in the beginning. Yet, when you lean into it and allow our Father to minister to you and teach you about the goodness of His character through the waiting, you will fall in love with it. You’ll learn how to delight in Christ even as you’re waiting for God’s faithfulness to come through.

David wrote Psalm 27:13–14 hundreds of years before the Gospel of Mark.

I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage; yes, wait for the Lord.

Notice he’s pinpointing your heart to take courage in the waiting. May I encourage you in the name of Jesus and say to you, God is faithful, and He will fulfill His Word to you in your life. If you learn how to wait on Him, His blessings will flow like a river.

Breathe deeply, knowing that your Father’s timing is perfect.

This devotion is an excerpt from my book, Big, Deep, Breath. It’s a forty-five-day journey to help you breathe in the love and rest of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Big Deep Breath is available from our Trexo website or Amazon.